Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2605.20529 (cs)
[Submitted on 19 May 2026]
Title:Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks
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Abstract:In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to syntactic dependencies. We investigate whether this mechanism can support the acquisition of English subject-verb agreement. First, we simulate language acquisition by training neural networks on synthetic datasets that vary in how predictable their subject-verb pairings are. We find that there is a range of variability levels at which these statistical learners robustly learn subject-verb agreement. We then analyze the variability of subject-verb pairings in child-directed language, and we find that the variability in such data falls within the range that supported robust generalization in our computational simulations. Taken together, these results suggest that collocational bootstrapping is a viable learning strategy for the type of input that children receive.
| Comments: | Accepted to CoNLL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.20529 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.20529v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20529
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks, by Claire Hobbs and R. Thomas McCoy
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